I was shot down by the Japanese while evacuating the air base. I still have the parachute - truly a memorable experience! A uniquely Jewish experience for me was attending special services in China conducted by a chaplain and attended by five Jewish men.

I was assigned to a personnel office after graduation from Administration School at Conway, Arkansas, in order to relieve a man for active duty. An interesting event occurred when all WACs were deployed from Camp Ruston, Louisiana, and it was turned into a Japanese POW camp. While in Massachusetts, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the home of a Jewish family for a Passover Seder.

My service career was spent in the Medical Corps, from basic training at Camp Barkley, Texas, to various technical schools. My service in the Army culminated in thirteen months as a Medical Aidman with the 76th Infantry Division in the ETO. My very special Jewish experience lay in finding a small synagogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I married Gertrude Cohen. That event has paid dividends to me for 52 years, and still counting.

One Jewish experience involved meeting two Jewish Army men at a San Diego USO on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Together we went to a synagogue for services. The Jewish community did not "pursue" us for further religious or recreational participation. I didn't meet any Jewish women Marines in camp; however, I did encounter anti-Semitism in the barracks. My parents were lonely without their only child and worried that I might be sent overseas to the Pacific. However, at that time, the Marine policy excluded women from overseas duty.

I trained in Battle Creek, Michigan for chemical warfare. While still in the states, and being a musician, I entertained troops in Augusta, Georgia and Gadsden, Alabama. After 43 days on board a transport ship, I was stationed in Calcutta, India, which was the jumping off place for the China-Burma-India Theater of war. Just prior to my arrival, a ship on the same route with 1200 troops was blown up. I was lucky. I left for service four days after the birth of my son and met many Milwaukeeans, among them Louis Gantzarow and Lorry Halperin. I remember a lot of anti-Semitic incidents in my own company; we had our own "Nazis".

I was flying one of six B24's that were returning from a bombing mission over Cebu City on Cebu Island in the Philippines. Suddenly the lead plane lost all four engines because of the engineer who accidentally shut them down while changing the gas tanks. Six men, out of a ten-man crew, were saved by seaplane and submarine. A special Jewish experience for me was when I attended Rosh Hashanah services on Palau Island, Carolines.

T/Sgt. Zalman Friedman
U. S. Army
June 1941 - November 1945
European Theater

My most memorable experience was when I was wounded by small arms fire while on a patrol at Monschau, Germany, but I managed to get the rest of the squad safely to our HQ. While interrogating an SS prisoner at the front, I noticed he took something out of his pocket, tore it up and threw it away. I picked it up and it was a bunch of snapshots of a mass grave, full of bodies which I presumed to be Jewish. (I kept the photos and sent them to the Wisconsin Jewish Archives) In answer to your question "What did your family experience while you were away? My immediate family, father, mother, brother and sister, were all murdered by the Lithuanian bandits in 1941.

I have always looked upon my entire tour of duty as an experience I shall always remember. Entering the interior of China then was like stepping back in time a thousand years or more. Living among people and in communities where time had stopped was awesome.

After the dropping of the A-bombs, I was assigned to Shanghai. There I attended services in a magnificent synagogue that had been built primarily under sponsorship of the Sassoon family of England in pre-war years when they had great business holdings in the Far East. I met many Jewish families who had fled Russia during the revolutionary years and had taken up residence in Shanghai, where they had prospered. I became closely associated with the Jewish community in the Hongkew District of Shanghai. These were the refugees from Nazi persecution who somehow managed to find their way from Europe to Shanghai and were interned there by the Japanese until the war's end. They had remarkable stories to tell.

My family experienced the same anxieties as all other families with people in the service. My father went to work in the defense industry at the Falk Corporation; my mother volunteered her time at the Red Cross.